Doonesbury

My favorite activity on Sunday morning is going online to read the Doonesbury comic strip. For years I've believed the easiest way to keep up with the world is to read Doonesbury every day. Trudeau simplifies issues and presents them with humor, and isn't afraid to ridicule any public figure who's making an ass of himself. Or herself, as the case may be.

The frame of reference for today's Daily Dose is the waterboarding controversy. This is another hot-button issue on which I'm stuck straddling the fence. As I was growing up, I got the idea that Americans were the good guys in every battle because they didn't do stuff like torture. Torturing prisoners was what made the Nazis, the Japanese, and the commies the bad guys in movies like The Bridge on the River Kwai that I loved as a kid. A movie that made a huge impression on me was Judgment at Nuremberg, in which Spencer Tracy presides over the trial of Burt Lancaster, a former German judge prosecuted for enforcing the law. That was my introduction to the concept of war crimes -- I've often thought about the points in that movie, particularly when considering the role of the judicial system in society.

Another problem I have with torture is that Dick Cheney is in favor of it. Rush Limbaugh talks about the Fox TV program "24" and Jack Bauer with reverence, and bases arguments favoring torture on depictions in that show. Which explains why I've never seen "24."

All the positive reviews of waterboarding (and enhanced interrogation techniques in general) are being written by Cheney, Limbaugh, Hannity and other people I hate and wouldn't trust if my life depended on it. What I need is documented evidence prepared by a reliable source that at least one specific terrorist attack was prevented strictly on the basis of information that we tortured out of some prisoner. Hard facts from dependable sources are the missing pieces of the puzzle right now.

The attacks on 9/11 were a big setback for many reasons, among them the fact that Cheney and Rove were given an opportunity to pull off shit they couldn't have gotten away with otherwise. The whole situation was just plain bad news, and repeats need to be avoided. So what do we do ?